It is April, 1942, and 25-year-old Lale is riding through Europe in a train, cramped in a cattle car with other Jewish men. Nobody knows where they’re going. Lale’s family is from Krompachy, Slovakia, and when he heard that the Nazis were forcing Jewish families to give the government a child older than 18, he offered himself up. The Germans claimed they would put him to work, but when he reported for duty, he didn’t know what he’d be doing, which is why he’s now dressed in a suit, wanting to look good regardless of what his job will be. But after days on the train without food, he can tell his new job won’t require a suit.
When the train arrives at its destination, SS officers force the passengers out and yell orders. Lale follows instructions as Nazis use the butts of their rifles to hit anyone who doesn’t obey them. He’s then led with the others into a building, where they line up and wait for identification numbers to be tattooed on their arms. During this process, he learns that he has arrived at Auschwitz, where he’ll be put to work. Upon receiving their tattoos, the prisoners are told to strip naked and enter a large shower. Afterwards, they find that their clothes have been replaced by striped prisoner garb, which Lale puts on before the Nazis shave his head. He’s then escorted to a nearby location called Birkenau, which is several miles from Auschwitz’s main area. He is assigned to Block 7, a building full of bunks, each of which is occupied by two to four prisoners. Lale and a man he met on the train named Aron share a bunk with two others and spend the night waiting for morning, when they’ll finally receive food. In the middle of the night, Lale goes outside to pee, relieved to see there’s a ditch for prisoners to relieve themselves. As he approaches, he notices three prisoners sitting over this ditch and quietly conversing, but before he gets too close, he sees two SS officers coming near. Without warning, they shoot the three prisoners before casually moving on. Devastated, Lale vows to himself that he’ll survive Auschwitz no matter what.
The following morning, the prisoners receive cups of weak soup. As they force it down, Lale jokes about the taste with Aron, cementing their friendship. They then meet their kapo, who explains that he’s their boss. The kapo assigns Lale to work on the roof of a half-built building, so he climbs a ladder and finds two Russians. Thankfully, Lale speaks multiple languages, so he’s able to communicate with these men, who tell him the best way to go about his new job. They also tell him important information about life in Auschwitz, explaining the power structures at play in the camp.
After witnessing another terrible murder one day, Lale faints, and it later turns out he has contracted typhus. When he wakes, he discovers he’s been unconscious for days. An old man who introduces himself as Pepan attends to him and helps him outside to get fresh air. Pepan is the Tätowierer, the prisoner who tattoos the new arrivals. He explains that a group of prisoners in Block 7 have been caring for Lale at night, and Pepan himself has been looking after him during the day. Pepan was walking by Block 7 when Lale’s body was placed on “a cart for the dead and dying,” and he watched as Aron begged the officer pulling the cart to leave Lale. The officer refused, but Aron dragged Lale off the cart when the officer wasn’t looking—an act that intrigued Pepan. This, he says, is why he himself decided to help Lale, thinking he must be a wonderful person if somebody was willing to risk saving him. He then offers Lale a job as his assistant, saying he could help him tattoo the prisoners. Lale hesitates at first, disliking the idea of scarring unwilling people, but Pepan says that somebody else will do it if he doesn’t. Moreover, whoever takes the job probably won’t be as empathetic as Lale. Thinking this over, Lale agrees to work as Pepan’s assistant.
When Lale returns to Block 7, he learns from his bunkmates that Aron was killed by the kapo for trying to protect him. Mortified, he listens as they tell him that they decided to continue helping him because Aron inspired them with his idea that “to save one is to save the world.” Weeping, Lale thanks them and hopes he can someday repay them, though he knows he most likely will never be able to.
Lale works with Pepan, meeting the SS officers who oversee their work. One day, he and Pepan are instructed to re-ink the tattoos of a group of female prisoners whose numbers have faded. Lale tells Pepan he can’t do this, since he has always respected women, but Pepan insists he has no choice. Accordingly, Lale goes about his job. While working on one of the prisoner’s tattoos, he notices that a man wearing a white coat is walking down the line and inspecting the women. The man soon reaches the woman Lale is tattooing and holds her face. Sensing that the woman is about to say something, Lale squeezes her arm and indicates that she should remain quiet. She heeds his advice, and after a moment, the man in white moves on. “Well done,” Lale whispers, committing her number to memory, looking into her eyes, and feeling his heart skip.
Not long after this encounter, Pepan disappears. Oberscharführer Houstek—Lale’s boss, and one of the highest ranking officers at Auschwitz—announces that Lale is now the Tätowierer. Unable to discern what has happened to his mentor, Lale accepts this as best he can and asks for an assistant to help him. Consequently, Baretski, the officer assigned to supervise Lale, grabs a man named Leon and forces him to be the assistant tattooist. That night, Lale learns that he now has his own room in a different block and will receive extra rations of food, so he starts smuggling out his extra portions and bringing them to his fellow prisoners. He also approaches a group of workers dressed in civilian clothes and strikes up a conversation with two of them, who explain that they’re not prisoners, but local workers who go home each night. The men are named Victor and Yuri, and they give Lale some sausage, which he cuts up and shares with a number of other prisoners. Victor and Yuri also agree to bring Lale other goods, but Lale tells them not to give him anything more until he finds a way to pay them.
During this time, Lale tries to connect with the woman who made his heart skip. Remembering her number, he asks Baretski—with whom he has become somewhat friendly—to give her a note. Baretski never misses an opportunity to remind Lale that he can kill him whenever he wants, but he agrees to deliver the note. The woman then writes back, saying that her name is Gita. Passing notes like this, they arrange to meet on Sundays when the prisoners are allowed to mill about the grounds, and though Gita is shy during their first encounter, it’s clear they both have feelings for one another. It is also during this period that Lale makes an arrangement with two women whose job it is to go through the prisoners’ former possessions looking for valuables. Lale gives these women pieces of sausage from Victor and Yuri, and they agree to bring him jewels and money. So begins his system of bartering, as he gives Victor and Yuri precious stones and money in exchange for chocolate, sausage, and other food items, which he spreads throughout the camp, making sure to give plenty to Gita and her friends.
At one point, Gita becomes life-threateningly ill with typhus. Distraught, Lale pays Victor and Yuri to obtain medicine, which he gives to Gita’s friends Dana and Ivana, who administer it to her. As he waits to see if Gita will recover, Lale realizes just how much he cares about her, despite the fact that he hardly knows her—after all, she won’t even tell him her last name, not wanting to share this information until they leave Auschwitz. To that end, Lale insists to her when she recovers that they will one day start a family and live free, kissing and making love whenever they want. And though Gita is hesitant to adopt his optimism, she comes around to this worldview.
At work one day, Lale tattoos an enormous man named Jakub, who whispers that he’s extremely hungry. With such a large frame, Jakub needs more food than the average person, so Lale tells him to hide nearby instead of following everyone to his block. At the end of the day, Lale takes Jakub back to his private room, gives him food, and walks him to where he’s supposed to be, knowing he has possibly saved this man’s life, since Jakub could have starved if he’d been forced to wait until the next day to eat.
By this point, Lale and Gita have cemented their relationship. They’re even able to start having sex because Lale bribes Gita’s kapo into letting them spend alone time in her block—an experience that makes Lale feel stronger and more determined to survive. However, it’s during this period that he enters his room to discover that two Nazis have found his stash of jewels and money, which he keeps under his mattress. The officers take him to one of the camp’s punishment blocks, where prisoners are tortured and often executed. Thrown into a cell, he waits until the door opens again, at which point he’s surprised to see Jakub. Jakub enters and explains that, because of his size, the Nazis made him the camp’s torturer. It’s his job, he says, to get Lale to confess the names of the prisoners who helped him smuggle in contraband. However, Jakub tells him, when the Nazis enter and watch the beating, Lale shouldn’t give up the names. Jakub will try to go easy on him, but he says he’s prepared to “kill one Jew to save ten others.” When the time comes, he beats and whips Lale but makes the punishment look worse than it actually is, eventually turning to the observing officers and saying he’s certain Lale must not know the names of the people who helped him. To Lale’s great surprise, this leads to his release, and he’s returned to his previous posting as the tattooist.
When rumors circulate that the Russian army advancing, the SS officers start acting nervous, quickly destroying the camp’s documents. In the commotion, Gita and many other female prisoners are rushed through the gates during a snowstorm. Just before she’s swept away, she yells to Lale that her last name is Furman. Shortly thereafter, Lale is put on a bus as Nazis shoot prisoners at random and the camp descends into mayhem. He’s then taken to a new concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria, where he wins over a guard by impressing him with his fluent German. This guard offers to transfer him to a safer camp in Vienna, and Lale accepts. Meanwhile, Gita manages to escape with three Polish women by running across a snowy field in a moment of confusion. Seeking help from people living in a nearby cottage, they successfully avoid Nazi scrutiny and get help from Russian soldiers, who drive them to Krakow, where they stay with one of the Polish women’s sister. From there, Gita travels with a truck driver to Bratislava because she—like Lale—is from Slovakia.
At the concentration camp in Vienna, Lale hides that he’s Jewish because the camp is intended for non-Jewish prisoners. Since the director of this camp is very old, Lale finds it easy to stay out of trouble. In fact, he’s able to escape through a hole in one of the fences, slipping out without looking back. Dashing into the woods, he comes upon a group of Russian soldiers, who take him as a prisoner. Because he can speak so many languages, they bring him to the chalet they’ve turned into their headquarters and tell him that he will work as a liaison between the soldiers and the women in town, informing him that he’ll be given food, shelter, and fine clothes in exchange for bribing the local women into coming to the chalet for parties. In this capacity, Lale offers women jewels and money to spend the night with the soldiers. Because he’s so charming, he’s quite good at this job, and the Russians soon trust him enough to let him drive into town on his own. Seizing this opportunity to escape, he makes his way into town, parks the car, steals a bike, and sets off. After a grueling journey, he finally reaches his home to discover that his sister is still alive, though his older brother has died and nobody knows what has become of his parents. Determined to find Gita, he goes to Bratislava after hearing that many Slovakians have been filtering into the cities from the concentration camps. Each day for two weeks, he waits at the train station in the hopes of spotting Gita, but he doesn’t see her. While making his way through the street one day, though, he spots her. Lale falls to his knees, so Gita kneels too and says that she loves him, at which point he asks if she’ll marry him. “Yes,” she replies, “I will.”
